Death Penalty Laws

This week in mapping we are creating a map that contains a full story. I chose to map recent statistics on death penalty laws worldwide.

I ran into a number of problems along the way. The most difficult was, although I thought it would be simple, I could not find a complete recent datasource online. After a lot of googling, I ended up creating my own data in CSV from the most recent Amnesty International report and Death Penalty Info.

I then had to add my data to the geoJSON world map. It took me a few attempts to get the info matched up correctly as the names and the number of countries did not match in the two different datasets. From there I had to combine the two sets of data into one geoJSON file. I first tried to do this by converting the geoJSON to CSV using an online converter. Unfortunately, the geoJSON lat, long coordinates didn’t translate correctly, and as a result it wouldn’t convert back to geoJSON properly. In the end, this code by Mimi Onuoha allowed me to add my CSV data to my original GeoJSON file.

One thing worth noting was how difficult it was to color this map. I didn’t want to be too literal with something like red for death penalty and blue for freedom, but I did want the colors to feel as though they had some relevance. In the end, I followed the Guardian’s lead in using red and blue tones.

Also, I felt really uncomfortable putting this map online, knowing that I wasn’t extra careful putting my data together. I decided to put a note in the code and credit line to make sure that if anyone stumbled across it they didn’t take the data for fact.